A Savage and Warlike Race (Cold War)

It’s April 13th, 2013. Duke Dumont is at number one, with Pink, Justin Timberlake, Nelly, Bruno Mars, and Bastille also charting. In news, things are mostly sleepy. There’s a beautiful entry on the Wikipedia list of historical events reading “Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley decides to tax the rain,” which apparently really just means that there’s a new tax on homes to help fund preservation efforts of the Chesapeake. The entire Paris Brown silliness happens, which probably speaks volumes about the tenor of UK culture right about then, though what it says is certainly open to interpretation. And Margaret Thatcher dies a few days before this, which had the sort of cultural impact you’d expect given what she came to represent in popular culture.

On television, Doctor Who proves a bit too prescient, launching its 80s themed story in the wake of all of this. I’m sure there’s a reading that’s long on synchronicity to be made here, but I feel like 2014 isn’t the time to make it. Let’s instead focus on what this story is doing, because I do think that’s interesting in this case. On paper, the pairing of Gatiss and Mackinnon seems like it should be perfect in every regard except for quality. Both are people one describes with the backhanded compliment “workmanlike.” Gatiss’s scripts are, as we’ve by now thoroughly established, long on nostalgic recreations of things that worked in the past. Mackinnon, who we’ve not really talked about at great length, is a functional director with a weakness for colored lighting. Taken together, one expects a bog standard episode of Doctor Who, which is not strictly speaking an inaccurate way of describing Cold War.

Since a running theme so far in our coverage of Season 7B has been its early historicization, it’s perhaps worth looking at Mackinnon’s contributions to Season Eight, since he directed 25% of it, and it gives a better sense of what he’s capable of than The Sontaran Stratagem/The Poison Sky and The Power of Three. His episodes are generally quite good - Listen is a very credible pick for season’s best. I was critical of the direction of Time Heist, and I stand by the claim that its attempt to mask its use of the same corridor through rapid changes of lighting color was a weakness in an episode without any major strengths. But even Listen is a functional job in which Mackinnon’s main job is to make the five settings feel distinct so that the episode is easy to follow. And Flatline is smart and efficient, much like its script. One can argue that this makes him as good as his material, but the other way of looking at that is that he can reliably get his teeth into the structure of a story and sell the big moments.

Similarly, Gatiss has approached this particular bit of unabashed nostalgia with a sort of steely determinism. The production circumstances are, in this case, revealing. Moffat initially took the view that bringing back the Ice Warriors was a bad idea. This is not an unreasonable assessment, given that they are a bunch of green lizards from Mars named the Ice Warriors. And thus the script looks like an attempt to convince a skeptical audience that this is worth doing in the first place. But notably, that audience is Steven Moffat, not some paranoid conception of the general public. And so the case is delivered with a certain degree of persuasiveness that broadly similar stories sometimes lack.

Given this, the Gatiss/Mackinnon pairing ends up having their major flaw counterbalanced. With both of them, the biggest problem is that they stop with their first idea. But in this case, the most obvious ideas are generally pretty good. What are the things that have worked about the Ice Warriors? They’ve got a good voice, they’re fun in shadowy close quarters, and they’re not always bad guys. The episode is designed around all three. The base under siege is translated to the Cold War that it always represented anyway. Dim flashing lights and wide angel lenses give a good visual aesthetic. Raiding the cast of Game of Thrones was inevitable, and it’s worth noting that they hired Gatiss for a small part the next year. And, of course, there’s the Ice Warrior outside of its armor, which is one of the most obvious twists you can do, and yet nevertheless a good one that meshes well with all the other choices.

Another way of putting this is that, as with The Unquiet Dead, Gatiss is picking on good material. Much of 2013 (and New Year’s Day of 2014) makes somewhat more sense if you know that The Enemy of the World and The Web of Fear were recovered, simply because it explains why the Troughton era was on everyone’s mind. Cold War is tangibly a clinical dissection of why those stories worked. He keeps the focus on two things Doctor Who can reliably do well: spooky corridors and above average British actors having moral debates. And he keeps the pace up with some decent gags and a good instinct for how to balance lampshading the plot holes and reveling in a line like “My world is dead but now there will be a second red planet. Red with the blood of humanity!”

Notably, though, where Moffat responded to The Web of Fear by nicking an obscure recurring villain and a mood, Gatiss took equally from Enemy of the World and David Whitaker, recalling that when Doctor Who works best is when it attempts to do serious drama with slightly ludicrous stakes. Big green lizard men are going to blow up the world, so let’s have an urgent debate about violence as a cycle. The result is something that, it has to be admitted, understands why stories like this were so common in 1968 and hits the highlights efficiently. This is a configuration of ideas and themes that has proven to be able to withstand doing multiple times. As a result, it is perfect for Gatiss.

In a sense, the other real influence is Robert Holmes, who was always a specialist at taking a premise and running through its most obvious configurations and set pieces. This skill is at the heart of the Gatiss/Mackinnon collaboration and why it is such a good pairing. Cold War is written as an exercise in ticking the boxes of “what makes a good Ice Warriors story,” and Mackinnon is at his best when given a list of big scenes to accomplish.

Credit also has to be given to Andy Pryor, who does well with the three Russians. Liam Cunningham brings a Nicholas Courtneyesque twinkle to the commanding officer, Tobias Menzies is perfectly willing to just be as hated as the part calls for, and David Warner is one of those Philip Madoc bits of Doctor Who casting: never the wrong move. Gatiss’s script is mindful that forty-five minute episodes do best by rapidly pairing off actors in a “variations on a theme” approach as opposed to slowly exploring a character’s change of heart, and so all three, along with Nicholas Briggs, who’s called upon to once again come up with a way to act in monster voice, and the two regulars have to be on form.

As for the regulars, Jenna Coleman’s clearly arrived ahead of her character arc at the moment, but is clearly enjoying finding a new set of ways to do Doctor Who companion things each week. Her performance is the most obvious thing to have benefitted from a year’s distance, because in hindsight you can watch how she put together the character she played in Season Eight. Her decision to keep reinventing her take on “generic companion” (and it’s worth remembering that this was filmed well before The Snowmen, and ages before Bells of Saint John and The Rings of Akhaten) had the price of looking inconsistent in Season Seven, but it fit well with both the Impossible Girl arc and the “movie posters” idea, and ended up giving her a uniquely flexible character once the underlying consistency of the performance started to solidify and then get paid off in characterization. She pounces upon the little moments the script offers her, and even when they’re clearly built as somewhat forced “what haven’t we had a companion do yet” moments (“Sing Duran Duran!” “Actually not run off!”), she makes something of them. Her scenes with David Warner are delightful in this regard, and in some ways a template for the Twelfth Doctor era: Jenna Coleman and an older actor playing stock characters with a slight twist on them. In this regard, it’s telling that they’re the only place in the script where Gatiss is going past the most obvious idea.

Which in turn highlights the biggest problem. Jenna Coleman doesn’t spend this one with the Twelfth Doctor. She spends it with Matt Smith, who has a rough time with this one. He picks up once the peculiarities of his relationship with Clara start giving him new things to do, but with this as the only story of the eight to have nothing whatsoever to do with the Impossible Girl arc and shot as only his second story with Coleman, he’s in an awkward place where he’s clearly missing Gillan and Darvill, but doesn’t have anything to replace them with in his performance yet. The degree to which Cold War can also be read as an attempt to do Warriors of the Deep correctly is ironic, as Smith is reduced to the same sort of thing Davison had to do with bad scripts, which is to just emote desperately and ineffectually until the plot runs out. You can almost see the moment when he finally runs out of ideas in the climax. It’s a rare episode where he’s the weak link, and there really is the sense that he’s reached the end of what he can do with the character. Which, fair enough. It’s fitting that, of all the episodes in his third season, it should be the unabashed Troughton homage that demonstrates why his suggestion that three years in the part is about right holds so much merit.

As with all Gatiss stories, this comes perilously close to being a review blog. That is in some ways inevitable with Season 7B, and indeed worth doing again now, while the era is still relevant to the present of the show, but freed from the gnawing terror of “is it going to stick the landing in November?” The movie posters approach is explicitly putting this series in the realm of pop music. The concern becomes “what’s the big statement this week,” with a series of Doctor Who being an exercise in owning a chunk of culture for a few months. There’s a delicate balance to this, with every story having to make a case for itself in contrast with the ones around it while contributing to the greater idea of Doctor Who. Everything has the weight of a definitive statement. Reviewing feels natural in response.

But let’s try to avoid that in favor of another way of looking at this in the context of Doctor Who’s Fiftieth Year. This is one of the few stories in 2013 you can point to as a reason why Doctor Who has made it this far in the first place. Which isn’t just that the basic premise is good, but that the show has a strong back catalogue that justifies its existence at any given moment. You don’t get to fifty years without a back catalogue worth raiding. The fiftieth anniversary was rightly concerned about being careful to look forward as much as backwards, but it would have felt painfully incomplete without a story that unabashedly offered a greatest hits parade. (In some ways, the Duran Duran bits exemplify the approach taken.)

But if it is necessary to let this become a review blog, let’s make it unambiguous that this is a positive review. I have been harsh on several Gatiss stories, and I stand by that, but it’s also the case that Gatiss-bashing has become a shibboleth for certain fan ideologies to an extent that’s undeserved. This story demonstrates the worth of the skills Gatiss brings to the toolbox. If you’re going to do Doctor Who specifically, a half-century on, you really do have to justify it by showing that the old standards still have legs. In many ways, the biggest problem with those Gatiss stories that have gone awry is that he’s the only one who bothers to put in some effort in perfecting old standards, while directors and actors phone it in and figure that this is one of the filler episodes. Give Gatiss a director and a set of actors who are up for the same game of carefully curating the past for its best moments and showing why they were good, however, and you get stuff that the season would genuinely be weaker without.

Comments

Cold War was one of those bang-on middle of the road stories. Didn't hate it. Didn't think it was amazing. Finished it, turned off, "Well, that was a thing that I saw on television". Which is really my issue with most of season 7b. The Ice Warrior looked great and was nice to see, but it felt like more of a pitch about 'here is why we should use the Ice Warriors again, look what they can do' rather than an actually worthwhile story. Clara felt like a complete non-entity in this story (it was only until Day of the Doctor I felt that she got a personality, and series 8 that she became a character) and David Warner felt wasted in that role. But, y'know, not terrible. Not great. Just a thing that happened for 45 minutes one Saturday.

Despite Phil's valiant defence of this episode, I'd rather have an adorable moppet trying to sing a story-eating gas giant to sleep than lines such as 'I will turn earth into a second red planet'.

I think the general charge against Season Seven B (if you leave out the general distaste for Rings and Journey that I don't share) is that it was playing everything slightly safe, and as a result never rose to any great heights.Which is fair enough (with the exception of Hide). This is the safest of the lot. I suppose there are worse aesthetic crimes than playing it safe. I can think of stories that don't even achieve safe. The story makes its case that the ice warriors could work.

I wonder - the dialogue is just a bit camp, but the directorial style is fairly straight. Would the dialogue work better if the direction were camper, or would that be intolerable?

While I agree Clara's almost entirely generic here, I do get the feeling that Gatiss has gone through the exercise of ticking boxes on Moffat's description of Clara's character. Once he's ticked the boxes he goes right back to generic, but I did get the impression that Moffat knew what Clara's character was, even if we don't.

Do we know what the internal description of Clara's character is? What hurts her for me is that Bells of Saint John does a poor job of setting her up, which is even more unfortunate, as in both Asylum of the Daleks and The Snowmen, the 'Clara' character is very well drawn in each case, with compelling personality and drives. In each case you could see how she'd function as a companion given her background and motivations and how she'd work. In Bells, she... is just sort of there. We know next to nothing about her, she doesn't really want to travel with the Doctor and she's pretty much an enigma.

I really like Phil's reading, that the 'Impossible Girl' arc is more an admonishment to the audience and the Doctor for looking at the mystery first and the character second, but it doesn't work for me, as there's no character to look at. An episode like Cold War probably wouldn't even be remarked about character-wise had she had a firm intro (after all, it would be like criticising Victory of the Daleks for making Amy bland) but three episodes in to a new companion, there's still nothing to really tell the audience what she is like.

Again, a real shame The Snowmen wasn't her actual introduction, as the Clara there was great. And she was great in series 8. Which begs the question, how did they fumble it so badly in series 7b (personal opinion, but a popular one regarding her character so it can't be dismissed out of hand).

Call me a pedant but it was the Ultravox gag that fell really flat for me. I just didn't buy David Warner's character being a fan of 80s synthpop and, from his delivery, I suspect Warner didn't either. It seems to me, in his eagerness to shoehorn in some kind of pop culture place-holder, Gattis didn't really think it through. A senior Soviet scientist in the 1980s of the age Warner seems to be playing would be more likely to be into some kind of 1960s agit-pop, the Velvet Underground, Zappa or even the Beatles rather than any western contemporary chart/dance fodder. Look at Vaclav Havel' s citing of Lou Reed' s lyrics as an inspiration in Czeckoslovakia's Velvet Revolution for instance. Notwithstanding that, the character's concern about Ultravox splitting up in the future comes out of nowhere as the band in question, unlike many others, were never one rumoured to be on the verge of splitting. In fact they lumbered on well into the early 2000s. I wonder if this is down to a kind of nerd/snobbery ignorance of pop history on the part of Gattis. His geek trivia knowledge perhaps stopping at Hammer horror and Doctor Who. The choice of Ultravox specifically struck me (and I'm older than Gattis) as a kind of wierdly 'Dad gets it wrong even though he was there' attempt at retro hipness.

Clara spends a lot of Bells of St John either taking in that her world has suddenly turned weird or needing to be rescued.Then there's the two Cross episodes, where Cross is having to work out how to write a Doctor Who story.And Gatiss is doing his 'these women things didn't need distinct characters when I was a lad; I don't see why they need more than this now' shtick.I quite lked Thompson's script, but again it doesn't play to Clara's strengths.And I don't know what went wrong with Neil Gaiman - probably that cybermen don't really suit his strengths.

Looking back at the season, you can see that she's meant to be someone who takes charge of a situation when she thinks she knows what's going on, and also that she's meant to be less brave and less likely to wander off on her own than other companions. But the plots don't always show that off.Also Matt Smith's Doctor is tolerant of just about everything and the Maitlands are children, so she doesn't get to play the double life thing that keeps the series arc of Season Eight going.

(And making Amy bland is a perfectly good criticism of Victory of the Daleks.)

Re: "...it’s also the case that Gatiss-bashing has become a shibboleth for certain fan ideologies to an extent that’s undeserved..."

That's the worst thing about the man! You can't even hate him properly! He's just talented enough that you feel like it's unfair to really let him have it for his flaws, when his scripts usually come out as watchable at the very least and there are clearly far worse writers out there. Couldn't he at least have the common decency to be lousy as well as hopelessly over-cautious?

I am not sure exactly what he's talking about here. I just bash him because nearly all his Doctor Who scripts are utterly shallow "greatest hits" pastiches - they do what they say on the tin and nothing more.

He also gets a huge black mark from me for his comment (in re: Victory of the Daleks) that Doctor Who doesn't have the scope for a complicated portrayal of historical figures (and, one presumes, eras) and that a "print the legend" approach is best. That's not the mindset I want out of any potential future show-runner.

That said, he does seem like a lovely man, and it's always a pleasure when he pops up on-screen in something. Plus, his Sherlock scripts have usually been far ahead of his Who writing, which kind of baffles. Maybe with Sherlock he feels more free to totally re-invent, whereas his Who writing is too deeply bound up in his own nostalgia to really break free. Meanwhile "An Adventure in Space and Time" was excellent, maybe because he'd been thinking about and re-writing it for a decade. In that case, he managed to hit all the well-worn talking points as well as giving it some depth and emotional impact.

One thing that bugs me about the episode is that the Doctor seems to show admiration if not awe towards the Ice Warrior general for pretty much the same reasons he has thinly veiled contempt for every human who's ever worn a soldier's uniform.

I thought Ultravox was actually pretty popular in the underground music network in the Soviet Union. I know that Midge Ure is (or was, anyway) super popular in Latvia, before they became independent from the USSR in 1991, to the point where the president of Latvia called him to tell him he was an icon there.

It was interesting to pair the Ice Warriors with Soviet Russia. The USSR and modern Russia often plays a role of an ambiguous bogeyman in pop culture - powerful, dangerous, the source of plot and intrigue but not so far off the scale of badness that there isn't the potential for detente or pragmatic alliance. I don't think the Ice Warriors have generally been intended to match with the Soviets in the way that the Daleks fit with Nazis - and if anything it is the Cybermen which have represented cultural fears of Communism. However, rather like the Klingons in Star Trek, they do represent an enemy that can center on plots of avoiding a war, or of preventing a nefarious plot against some kind of diplomacy.

"I just bash him because nearly all his Doctor Who scripts are utterly shallow "greatest hits" pastiches - they do what they say on the tin and nothing more."

But at least they do what they say on the tin. It's frustrating to see someone so obviously talented aim so low, but it's not as bad in practice as actually watching something made by someone untalented.

While I actually enjoyed this episode from a safe, fun sort of way, I would take issue with the "three year" rule that Troughton came up with, as well Phil's assessment that Matt's performance bottoms out here.

How about this for a start: after two years, give the actor something more to do and see if they rise up to the occasion. Lets take a look not at Troughton the actor, but the writing for the second season and third season of Pat's Doctor Who. I would make the case that he got bored with the part because they gave him little to challenge him. Bored, he decided that 3 years was enough. Matt's performance in the 50th special was his own War Games: the big hurrah where gets lots of great stuff to do and to show how good he is right before he shuffles off the stage. In many ways, matt's third season is problematic as he'd established his Doctor under two seasons of Moffat getting more and more experimental with regards to the linear aspect of season arcs and non-linear storytelling, and his third is rather... ordinary in many places. Just as Tom Baker didn't bottom out a Horror at Fang Rock, recently re watching the episodes from this season that i enjoyed, Mercy, Hide, Dinosaurs and most of Power of Three, I see nothing wrong with Matt's performance. I really think that weakness is in the writing of Jenna's character, which was generic and forgettable.

(Does anyone else ;think that season 7 would ahve been better had there not been the 50th anniversay speical? I really think that it was too much, spread everyone so thin, that the season itself suffered as a result. Which, perhaps, is to be expected, but still...)

so, no, i disagree that Matt had taken his performance as far as it could go. If the writing had given him some new directions in plot, i have no doubt that he could have gone there with them. Three years is only a limit, i think, when you're building the stories out of the character of the Doctor. When you build the stories out of interesting predicaments and let the Doctor warp the narrative, then you have very few limits to what you can do.

I haven't rewatched it since it aired, so this may be me being an idiot, but I distinctly remember feeling there was something else going on with Warner's character, something Doctory, that would become a plot point at a later date. Perhaps I'm misremembering, or I've forgotten a really obvious parallel that was made or something, but I certainly remember something fishy about him and don't remember it being paid off. Perhaps it was just Ultravox.

I guess we've still got one more Gatiss story to go, but I suppose this is as good a time as any to discuss the issue of "What would a Gatiss-run Who look like?" Because I think that, as much as nobody seems terribly enthusiastic about the idea, it seems like our most likely post-Moffat fate.

I kind of feel like Gatiss would likely be perfectly fine at shepherding other people's scripts through - as I think Phil said on tumblr on the same question, Gatiss at least has good taste. But I have a hard time imagining what kind of season arcs we'd get. Davies and Moffat are at least as big fans of the classic series as Gatiss, but they also had very clear ideas of stories they wanted to pursue that the classic series never did. One never really gets that sense from Gatiss.

But obviously Gatiss is a smart enough man to realize that you can't power an entire series of Doctor Who on a bunch of nostalgic callbacks and light romps. So what would he do with it?

I don't know whether Ultravox specifically was the misstep, but I have to say if I could have changed one single thing about this story it would have been to cast someone else in the David Warner role. Rather than paraphrase it, I'll just post here what I wrote about it at the time:

That ghastly exception is, of course, David Warner, thoroughly miscast as the supposedly charming and genial Professor Grisenko. We know he’s charming and genial because he enters the episode clutching a Walkman and tunelessly moaning the chorus of an Ultravox song (“Vienna”) whose lyrics (“This means nothing to me”) telegraph that he’s the one who’s above all this Cold War nonsense. He just cares about Science! which is why he has what is obviously a seven-foot humanoid in a block of ice but thinks he’s found a mammoth (we can assume he’s lying to the captain, but there’s no way to be sure). I don’t blame Gatiss here. On paper, this guy really could have been adorable and sweet, but either the director or the actor is unable to stop David Warner from being David Warner. He comes off as even creepier than the Ice Warrior most of the time, especially and most unfortunately when he’s trying to comfort Clara and/or convince her to join him in a rousing chorus of “Hungry Like the Wolf.” Someone else could maybe have pulled this off and turned this improbable goofy character into one of the darlings of the season. David Warner is a fine actor and he does his best here, but he’s just not what the doctor ordered.

Sometimes I wonder if he does what he does because he's the one that can do it, whereas when other writers come in with less of a solid Who pedigree they're never going to be able to go trad to any convincing extent. That is, I wonder if Gatiss is hired specifically to do this kind of episode because the showrunners believe there's a segment of fandom that craves it. And perhaps they're right.

Three years is only a limit, i think, when you're building the stories out of the character of the Doctor. When you build the stories out of interesting predicaments and let the Doctor warp the narrative, then you have very few limits to what you can do.

My best hope here is that my theory above is correct and he is typically asked for the nostalgia episodes, and that maybe there's something he's been holding back on so as not to invade the showrunners' territories. Seems really unlikely, but it's possible. I'm guessing he either goes deep into the horror realm or deep into camp -- Hinchcliffe or Williams -- or both, a la "The Crimson Horror."

Or: maybe rather than being the one who writes all the pivotal we've-never-seen-anything-like-this-before segments of the seasons, he writes the nostalgic episodes and hires other people to do unusual things. Having never been a huge fan of the arcs, I wouldn't really mind this very much.

Maybe he finally gives us a gay Doctor. Hey, I can dream.

Worst case scenario to my mind is that he doubles down on the daddy issues and we finally meet Ulysses.

I wish that were the case, but reading interviews, he is strongly of the opinion that there is a Platonic ideal of Doctor Who, and that it was achieved during the period that he was a teenage boy, and that everything they've done since has been a huge mistake and it's his job to go back to doing it The Right Way.

There's a reason that one of his jokes had to be cut from the BBC's anniversary sketch, "The Pitch of Fear"--it's because it was insultingly derogatory to everyone who worked on the programme in the last six or seven years of its original run. He just can't get behind the idea that anything they did after about 1980 was worth a damn.

Except Smith wasn't on for three YEARS -- he was on for three SERIES. He'd been working on Doctor Who since 2009, so from his perspective, it'd been about four or five years for him. Might help understand where he was coming from -- five straight years of work on the series would tire anyone out, I think, let alone a bouncy 26-year-old as he hits 30.

I don't know if this is part of what you mean, but the most interesting thing for Lt Stepashin to do, rather than spill the beans about the nuclear missiles to Skardak, would have been to get on the line to Moscow. A different story, perhaps, and perhaps more xenophobic from a Western perspective, but still, more interesting.

@ TymothiMidge Ure is (or was, anyway) super popular in Latvia, before they became independent from the USSR in 1991, to the point where the president of Latvia called him to tell him he was an icon there.

That's just the kind of crazy cold war fact that must be true and possibly Gattis was aware of that but it doesn't negate my feeling that the gag fell flat.

Yes there was something oddly subtextual going on with Grisenko which, when it failed to pay off, I just put down to Gattis expecting the Ultravox gag to be more of a zinger than it was. maybe they did have something in mind for the character that that was lost in the final cut. I just assumed he was supposed to be a Soviet Pertwee analogue (dotty parascientific advisor to the military). I don't think Warner played it badly. In fact, I think the weight he brought to the role conspired to unbalance the overall effect, leading to those bonkers chameleon arch etc theories.

I think that's exactly the same point Phil's making though. The writing at this point in season 7B just wasn't pushing Matt Smith anymore and so that probably reinforced his choice to go. To push the Troughton parallel slightly further (and to be slightly unfair to Cold War) this is Smith's Dominators. Obviously Troughton and Smith both had high points to come (The Mind Robber and The War Games for Troughton and The Name/Day/Time of the Doctor trilogy for Smith) but it was probably the right creative decision for both them as actors and the show.

My recollection of Cold War is that I very much enjoyed it as a retro 80s Doctor Who thing (Warriors of the Deep done right, as Phil says), and I don't think I noticed if Matt was flailing a bit. I went to check what I said on my LJ at the time, and it turns out that was when the BT HomeHub was down, so I didn't.

There's a reason that one of his jokes had to be cut from the BBC's anniversary sketch, "The Pitch of Fear"--it's because it was insultingly derogatory to everyone who worked on the programme in the last six or seven years of its original run.

More so than the ones they did broadcast? "Any f*cker with an Equity card".

Yeah, I remember thinking on watching this that it was a very well done nostalgic base under siege - I think Gatiss did a good job on it (as did Mackinnon). My only real problem with it was that I wasn't particularly interested in what it was doing.

I was actually just thinking of this one promotional event that Matt Smith did shortly after his first season playing the Doctor wrapped. It was when he joined the Orbital set at the 2010 Glastonbury festival to play the Doctor Who theme with them. He was clearly having an amazing time, loved throwing improvised catchphrases at the audience. He was the Doctor and this was his moment.

I compare that to his goodbye message to the Doctor Who fans as he was filming that Ryan Gosling movie in Detroit. Smith was thankful, but also solemn, like he had already said goodbye even though he still had a regeneration special left to film. The magic had truly gone for him.

The context in which I enjoyed this was indeed as a nostalgia piece that also attempted to touch on and improve on ideas behind stories such as Warrior of the Deep. I also basically loved the re-visioning of the Ice Warriors as wearing armour, as to be honest I'd never thought of that.

I think Gatiss has a pretty fixed idea about what Who is, and I don't feel him as being showrunner material. Did *love* Crimson Horror though!

The skills and assets needed to be showrunner aren't necessarily the same as what is needed to be an exceptional writer, though. I need only to point at the Moffat backlash to show that even the most anointed of writers can be a showrunner that is not to everyone's liking (I think he's great for the most part, but he's only human). Chris Chibnall may not be my favourite writer, but he has shown himself to be an amazing showrunner for other programmes, he'd probably be my choice if I'm honest.

It's funny - coming back to reread these now, well in the wake of series 8 and starting to think seriously about getting excited for series 9, I actually forgot that this was a Smith episode in the course of reading the first section of the article. It's so easy to imagine this episode done with Capaldi that I find myself vividly picturing him in scenes, and unable to imagine how Smith might have played them, even though he did.